may · contain · language

EDIT: Actually the last link above, with the text "runners-up", is the winner - logically published in solitary majesty. What was published today was just the first collection of runners-up.

Ok. Still in garrityania, the first Skin Horse print collection is coming out in August. I haven't pre-ordered it so far, but I guess I will be buying it at some point.

And I've finally gone and bought my very own plush gerbil. Let's see, I should have some photos somewhere...

 
Next week, I'll probably continue publishing the result of my "photo walk" in Ghent from a couple of weeks ago, with Swedish commentary. Hope to see you again then!

Current Location:	Ghent
Current Mood:	rejected

xkcd is a webcomic of romance, sarcasm, math, and language by Randall Munroe. xkcd in Wikipedia.

Hm... It seems much of what I wanted to do here already is done towards the end of http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia_in_culture. So you can check that out also.

Comic 155 - Search History (I would have missed this one without "Wikipedia in culture".)
Comic 185 - Wikifriends (Wikis in general rather than Wikipedia, but still...)
Comic 214 - The Problem with Wikipedia (Of course...)
Comic 256 - Online Communities (South, center. No Wikipedia on Map of the Internet, it seems. There may be some technical reason.)
Comic 285 - Wikipedian Protester (Mm... quite... subtle, really. No?)
Comic 333 - Getting Out of Hand
Comic 446 - In Popular Culture
Comic 545 - Neutrality Schmeutrality (See also http://www.xkcd545.com/)
Comic 547 - Simple
Comic 548 - Kindle

Dates for these would have been neat.

Current Mood:

blank

Kram på er! Snart blir det rapporter från det exotiska Belgien!

Phew.

http://www.freerice.com

See http://notalwaysright.com/. Funneh.

There's also a Swedish site with the same concept, http://www.intealltid.se/.

If that wasn't clear, you can chat with Elbot here. It's sort of fun.

Role-Playing Games as Language Games – A study of language use in a tabletop role-playing game

Abstract

In tabletop role-playing games, or simply role-playing games, one creates a fictive world using language and acts in this world. The participants take on the role of one character each and describe what these characters do. One participant, the gamemaster, instead describes what the characters see and what happens around them, and plays the roles of persons they meet. The purpose of this paper is to describe how role-playing games work from a language perspective, focusing on how the participants collaboratively build a fictive world and how they later act in this world, and also on how the role-players avoid misunderstandings involving the domains of reality and fiction and how these are ”held apart” in the conversation. This purpose is achieved by an analysis of a recording of a role-playing session.

A chronological description of the session, with special focus on the first part, shows how the session can be divided into different phases, and how the gamemaster moves ”the plot” forward in a way reminiscent of a book or a film. This chronological description also gives a clear image of how the gamemaster and the players build the world of the game together and act in it through the characters. As in other kinds of oral fiction-creating, utterances which describe the fictive world also create it. However, for additions brought in to the fiction to become a part of the shared image of the game world, they need to be accepted by the other partcipants, and the conversation can be described as a negotiation about what description of the game world is to be regarded as ”true”. Decisive for this acceptance is that an utterance follows the formal and informal rules of the role-playing game. The game's most basic structure is that of the gamemaster's descriptions of environments and events being followed by the players' descriptions of what their characters do. Often, however, various kinds of questions and the answers to these can be as important a part of the game. Jokes and out-of-character (and seemingly non-game related) discussions can also have an impact on the construction of the game world. An interesting part of the game is dialogues, where players and gamemaster directly take on the roles of the game-world characters and say what they say, rather than primarily describing their actions.

Reality and fiction is primarily kept apart (and misunderstandings avoided) by letting only one domain,at a time, the game world or our reality, function as the ground for the conversation (to be where the conversation ”is” in some sense). With a term borrowed from Sven Strömqvist's Make-Believe through Words (1984) it becomes the background domain. Ambiguous expressions are by default assumed to refer to something in the background domain. This, for example, is true of personal pronouns as jag (I) and du (you, sing.), since these are used to refer to the player characters. Switching between the domains can be done in many ways and for different reasons, often analogous to shifting between various topics in a ”normal” conversation. Questions such as which is the current background domain, or whether a particular expression has its referent outside the background domain, can often be decided by assessing what is meaningful and reasonable, or with the help of the strong intralinguistic cohesion maintained throughout the game. Various kinds of more or less explicit ”domain markers” also play a part, as do the typical structures found in many of the ”game utterances”. Combined with an avoidance of ”returning to reality” once the game world has been taken as background domain, these factors make misunderstandings rare. When they do arise, repair strategies are available, and the problems are quickly solved.

In the discussion at the end of the paper, a comparison with other kinds of ”fiction creation”, like writing and reading of novels and storytelling, is made. One important point is the social element present also in these contexts. Communication of all kinds, indeed, can often be said to create a parallell world and, as in the role-playing game, a negotiation on how this world is to be described is needed. This also is discussed at the end of the paper, along with questions about how much in the language and language use of role-playing games that can be said to be ”unique”, and also how much is predictable given the basic premises of role-playing games.
 

Keywords: role-playing games, conversation analysis, pragmatics
 
Link to the full paper (in Swedish).
 
Now just one thing remains... Nothing above is really news to those of my readers who know Swedish (which I still suspect is all my readers), at least not if they checked in two weeks ago. Thinking of this I've promised a bonus of some sort. Let's see... I can't imagine that Bernardo Borgeson minds that I link to this nice short film.

Ok, that wraps it up I guess. See you in a week!

Current Location:	zu Hause, watching Octopussy documentary
Current Mood:	content

G'night.

Hi...
Not so much time to spare now in the last few hours of this week, so I'll just throw out some links to my hungry crowd of readers and the continuation of the Istanbul tale will have to wait.

Some fun (the nature of which you will by reason of my lack of time have to find out for yourself) can be had (for all?) at the following websites, all created by Randall Munroe of xkcd fame:

http://bestthing.info
http://thecutest.info
http://thefunniest.info
http://thefairest.info

Yeah. That's it for this week, I think.
/MHO

Current Location:	on the floor
Current Mood:	stressed
Current Music:	David Bowie, but also TV

A few weeks later, my girlfriend shows me this.

Wow. What must not the real thing be like?

Once again, I find myself wishing I was in San Fransisco.

Going to Istanbul over New Year, though. That's nice too.